Spyced

I'm losing patience with sqlite. I've been working on Spyce examples using postgresql, but now that I'm getting close to releasing Spyce 2.1, I figured I'd better convert the examples to use sqlite since that's such a no-brainer to set up. It has been a frustrating experience. Weird-assness I've run into includes "int" is not the same as "integer" (always use the latter to avoid unpleasant surprises) It's impossible to get useful information about column DEFAULTs programmatically There's a bug in the parsing of some three-way joins And I didn't think I was doing anything very complicated! My examples have three tables at most! Really my overall impression is one of a "0.9" product at best. I'm amazed that so many people appear to use this festering pile of gotchas in production.

Apparently PragDave had the temerity to suggest at RailsConf that Rails could stand some improvement in some areas, such as supporting composite primary keys in ActiveRecord. Naturally, the first reaction of a huge Rails fan like Martin Fowler is to get to work figuring out how to implement this. Whoops, sorry, no, that would be in some alternate universe where fanboyism isn't the most important technical prinicple for some people. Martin's real reaction was to write a rebuttal , the gist of which is, if Rails doesn't already support it, it can't be important. It's sad when someone who's done some good work puts on the fanboy blinders. You used to get the same schtick from mysql.com back in the 3.x days. Remember the rants in their docs about how foreign keys and transctions were for wimps and real programmers didn't want them anyway? Of course, today even mysql corporate admits that these are important features, even though one can be forgiven for ...

Andrew Smith pointed out that according to Indeed.com, Python is about a factor of 3 times more popular than Ruby and is maintaining that lead as both graphs trend upwards. I'd like to add just a couple things that I noticed. One is that, like Django , Rails is a term with multiple meanings, and the Ruby framework only accounts for a small fraction of jobs that Indeed pulls up for that term. (I'm impressed that Indeed allows you to nest arbitrarily complex boolean expressions here...) Another is that although Python looks pretty popular vs Ruby or Lisp, it's a good thing that popularity doesn't really reflect how good a language is, because ye olde statically compiled languages are still seven to twenty times more popular than python . Even PHP and Perl are more popular. (Although the trend on Perl is definitely down-sloping, for which we can all give thanks. C++ also has a noticable downward trend.)